"Osama bin Laden raid doctrine" : Agree or Disagree ?

[steve2470]

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/17/2411507/us-asserts-unilateral-terrorist.html

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. will keep targeting al-Qaida anywhere in the world, including in countries unable or unwilling to do it themselves, the top U.S. counter terror official said Friday.

White House counter terror chief John Brennan laid out what could be called the Osama bin Laden raid doctrine, in remarks at Harvard Law School. He says under international law, the U.S. can protect itself with pre-emptive action against suspects the U.S. believes present an imminent threat, wherever they are.

That amounts to a legal defense of the unilateral Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed al-Qaida mastermind bin Laden in May, angering Pakistan. It also explains the thinking behind other covert counterterrorist action, like the CIA’s armed drone campaign that only this week killed a top al-Qaida operative in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The Obama administration has quadrupled drone strikes against al-Qaida targets since taking office.

The Obama administration has more recently expanded drone strikes and the occasional special-operations raid into areas like Somalia, where the weak government may be willing to fight al-Qaida but lacks the resources. Navy SEALs targeted al-Qaida operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in Somalia in 2009, by helicopter. The SEALs then landed to pick up his body and bury it at sea, just as bin Laden was later interred.

[Harmony Blue]

1. Disagree

OBL was a high profile target, and even then I disagreed how it turned out.

[Cool Logic]

4. As it turned out, OBL died, while we sustained zero casualties...

I don't know how it could have turned out any better than that.

[zeemike]

11. Well I do.

That form the start it was treated as a legal matter....and we would not need an army to do that...We could have made them international criminals and put pressure on governments like we did Cuba and kept the pressure up and would have gotten him sooner than we did anyway.
Would have saved two trillion dollars....hundreds of thousands of lives and still have the satisfaction of trying him in a court of law to confirm that guilt.
But then I suspect my way offered less opportunity for power to be taken and given and profited by....and stood the chance of exposing some dark secrets.

[Cool Logic]

13. My comments pertained to the OBL kill, not the Iraq and Afghanistan wars...

Obviously, we had no choice but to deal with Afghanistan in some manner, but our invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and ill-advised.

[Arctic Dave]

2. Disagree strongly.

Blatant American Exceptionalism.

[FarCenter]

3. Killing a citizen of another country on the territory of another country is an act of war

[Cool Logic]

5. Well, you can't have a war and expect that no none will be killed.

[timtom]

12. We don't have a war!

We have illegally invaded and occupied two sovereign nations! Whoops, make that three sovereign nations!

[Cool Logic]

14. I agree with you on two out of three; however...

we had the legal right to engage Afghanistan. Don't misunderstand, in no way do I support our magnitude of engagement, but clearly, the use of Special Forces and drones in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan, is justified.

[coalition_unwilling]

6. Love the sanitized language -- 'pre-emptive action' translated into

the particulars of the Osama bin Laden case means extra-judicial executions. Somewhere between 1945 and 2011 America lost its way, starting I'd say on November 22, 1963, but maybe going back to 1947 and the formation of the modern National Security State. This is where those steps leads eventually, to a verbose and grandiose 'might makes right' type of doctrine.

[timtom]

17. I absolutely and totally agree with you.

We did lose whatever innocence we might have had the day Kennedy was murdered. And it has been a terrible downhill spiral since then, especially when Reagan became president and after.

[Modern_Matthew]

7. The threats we face are the result of actions like this. nt

[jaxx]

8. I agree.

It beats the hell out of invading a country with boots on the ground, sticking around for war for years, and draining the economy like bush did.

[Honeycombe8]

9. I agree. I may not always agree with everything done/not done. But I agree w the doctrine.

As usual, a lot depends on who is making the calls to do what.

[steve2470]

10. Full text of Mr. Brennan's remarks are here:

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/09/john-brennans-remarks-at-hls-brookings-conference/

[GeorgeGist]

15. US law prohibits such acts on US soil.

It's called pre-meditated murder.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

16. War without borders. Isn't that also the Al-Queda doctrine?

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Friedrich Nietzche