Let's be clear: Osama bin Laden was executed – and for good reason

Let's be clear: Osama bin Laden was executed – and for good reason

Imagine the media circus if the Americans had put the al-Qaeda chief on trial in New York City.

Boris Johnson



Well, that's handy. We have all just learnt some useful etiquette about how to greet US Navy Seals arriving unexpectedly in your house when you have just gone to bed. If you find yourself lying there with your wife, just after turning off the lights, and there is a terrific racket from downstairs, you need to follow these essential dos and don'ts.

If the ninja-clad gunmen start charging up the stairs and shooting up your relatives, you are perfectly entitled to stick your head out of your bedroom door and have a gander. You may gawp in horror as a bullet whangs into the plaster near your ear. But if you try to dodge the next bullet, I am afraid you may be deemed to have committed a "hostile act". If you are so rash as to duck back into your bedroom, you will apparently entitle the Seals to follow you into the matrimonial chamber, shoot your wife in the leg and then blow you away with a shot in the chest and the head.

Yup, it was Osama bin Laden's "hostile act" of bullet-dodging that cost him his life, says the White House. If he had only stayed out there on the landing and taken the next bullet square on the mazzard, he would have been beyond suspicion, it seems. As an explanation for killing an unarmed man, this is starting to get embarrassing. I am reminded of the old South African police force, who used to explain deaths in custody by saying that their unarmed black detainees had launched savage attacks with their left temples and the smalls of their backs on the steel toecaps of their guards.

So why don't we all just cut the cackle and admit the groaningly obvious. It is perfectly clear why the US will not release the video footage they were all watching in the White House, and that caused Hillary to press her knuckles to her mouth. There was no firefight. Osama bin Laden did not cower behind his wife, spraying the US troops from his AK-47 like some scene from Call of Duty: Black Ops. That was a lie that went round the world faster than it took the truth to get its boots on, and the truth was that bin Laden hadn't even got his dressing gown on, let alone his boots, before he was despatched into the arms of Shaitan.

This was an assassination, a liquidation, an extra-judicial killing and a termination with extreme prejudice. Whichever way you look at it, President Obama has carried out one of the most effective whack jobs ever seen, and if he doesn't get re-elected I will be amazed. Osama is a has-bin, who sleeps with the fishes of the North Arabian sea, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

But when the president tells us that "justice has been done", I think he needs to be a bit fuller in his definition of "justice". It was 10 years ago this December, when the net was closing in on bin Laden in Tora Bora, that I wrote a pious piece in this very space, urging that the mass murderer should be put on trial. Read him the Miranda, give him his two telephone calls, and then arraign him for multiple homicide in New York and around the world.

It may be painful and problematic, I argued, but that is the difference between them and us. It's civilisation versus barbarism, the rule of law versus the law of the jungle. It's what we're fighting for. Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum, I said; and 10 years on I have to admit I can see why the Americans have not found it easy to follow my advice. Having pinpointed his lair, they could hardly have asked the Pakistanis to put him on trial – not when the Pakistani security services seem to be some kind of affiliate of al-Qaeda. They couldn't hold the trial in the Hague, since the US does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

In an ideal world, they would have put him on trial in NYC, the place of his greatest crime. And then what? A secret trial would have been deemed suspicious; so we would have endured a long, show-boating courtroom drama, with lawyers from the school of the O J Simpson defence trying to cast doubt on any connection between the accused and 9/11, and the cameras of the world would have been trained for weeks on the noble and priestly features of the accused, as he subjected America and her allies to some of his finger-wagging denunciations.

Though a New York jury would certainly have sent him down, they don't have the death penalty there – and so his place of incarceration would have become a shrine, the nearby pavements covered with the wax of cretinous candlelit vigils. Having been completely obscured by the events of the Arab spring, al-Qaeda would be back on the airwaves recruiting again – and that is perhaps where the Americans could mount a legitimate argument for what they have done. Bin Laden may represent a threat to US interests whether he is dead or alive, but the reality is that he is much less of a threat in his current subaquatic position than he would be in either a courtroom or a prison.

In so far as President Obama has a duty to protect America and Americans, he almost certainly has the necessary legal cover, provided by Congress, to remove bin Laden from the scene by any means at his disposal, and that is what he has triumphantly done. As an argument, it is not without its difficulties. If America is to go around indulging in extra-judicial liquidation of anyone who poses a threat to American interests, then we are entitled to wonder where it will end. We may be worried that the enemies of America may be spurred to symmetrical retaliation and that we will be caught up in a cycle of killing and counter-killing.

But it is at least plausible, and emotionally convincing, to say Osama bin Laden was a clear and present danger to America; he had it coming, and the president had him killed. All I ask is that we stop pussy-footing around about "hostile acts" and accept that this was an execution.